2 ms·

Oh interesting, thanks for that tidbit of knowledge! I always thought they all (mega, tera, giga, etc) went off the powers-of-2 system. Also, you have a typo,

• anonymouz 14y ago
  > Also, you have a typo, 1 Petabyte = 10^15 bytes I believe. Thanks! The power-of-2 system was quite popular for a long time when applied to computers, but always clashed with the much older (and well thought out) SI system where everything is defined in powers of 10, and that is used everywhere else (think physics,...). I think harddrive companies where the first to switch their definitions to the decimal based system (for the obvious reason that their disks would then seem bigger to people accustomed to the common power of 2 system...). A decade or so ago the kibi, mebi, ... prefixes where introduced, and at some point people more or less switched to those. There seems to be an even more detailed article about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix .